Kobe Bryant and Lakers owner Jerry Buss embrace after winning the franchise's 16th NBA title by beating Boston in 2010. KEVIN SULLIVAN, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

If you’re one of the many Lakers fans out there ignoring all this lockout stuff and simply waiting until your team gets back to all its usual winning, the awakening is going to be quite rude.

And the alarm clock here is more like a final horn.

The Lakers’ most golden age is already over.

The landscape that enabled the Lakers to live like kings on everyone’s courts is being wholly redesigned in the current collective bargaining, and there’s only one word to describe how the hedges will be trimmed from here on out: evenly.

So unstoppable are the forces at work here – take note, NBA Players Association – that even Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who mastered every angle of this game set up for him to win, knows it’s pointless to stand in the way.

While Buss and the Lakers showed off jewels and staged parades, most other NBA owners in smaller markets with smaller budgets felt their competitive spirits nearly broken by all their on- and off-court losses.

This lockout, this opportunity to reshape the league’s structure, is their NBA Finals.

With three-fourths of the owners baring wounds dripping red ink – self-inflicted or not, convincing or not – it’s simple math to a logician like Buss. He started out as a chemist and also worked as an aerospace engineer. Now he spends much of his time playing professional poker, leaning on solid odds while also knowing what others’ cards are by the way they hold their eyes.

And for sure, in the eyes of owners such as Sacramento’s Joe and Gavin Maloof, Phoenix’s Robert Sarver, Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert and Charlotte’s Michael Jordan, there is fire now.

Although cash can’t buy championships (see Knicks, New York), there’s no disputing how high the Lakers’ payrolls have been as they’ve been winning lately. Kobe Bryant’s league-high $25 million pay aside, Buss is set to spend $34 million next season on Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum – and then another $9 million on Lamar Odom just to back those two up.

NBA commissioner David Stern went so far as to invoke the Lakers’ name Tuesday in explaining why owners are entrenched in getting a hard cap from the players during collective bargaining.

“A team like the Lakers with well over $100 million in payroll and Sacramento at 45, that’s not an acceptable alternative for us,” Stern said. “That can’t be the outcome that we agree to.”

As much as Buss loves his rum and Coke, he has held a Molotov cocktail with the NBA’s limited revenue sharing and soft salary cap. It has allowed Buss and his minority investors to make a lot of money and feel comfortable spending a ton of it on great players others can’t afford.

But dramatically increased revenue sharing will inhibit the Lakers’ spending. A hard cap will flat-out prevent the Lakers from spending. It’s lose-lose when Buss is 77 years old and determined to come from behind the Boston Celtics in total championships, 17-16.

Yet the Lakers have accepted it. Why?

For the greater good.

And you can’t play in a league of your own anyway. However much he leads his unfettered, playboy lifestyle – his latest summer vacation to enjoy was through Europe – Buss is married to these other NBA owners, for better or worse.

So with their days of shopping alone on Rodeo Drive ending, the Lakers intend to go out gracefully – and loyally to Stern, for whom Buss has always had an appreciation.

The many specifics of revenue sharing still need to be worked out – and progress is expected on that front Thursday in the NBA’s board of governors meeting in Dallas – but Buss is fully accepting that his pockets will be where most of the grabs go. He’s hopeful the revenue-sharing system leaves him some protection, but wherever the details of the sharing and capping go, Buss considers himself – bottom line – a team player on the owners’ side.

And speaking of sides and players, you could make a tremendously compelling argument that Buss has more to lose the way these negotiations are going than the NBA’s actual players do.

This is not to say the Lakers are giving up. For one thing, Buss knows the deck will still be somewhat stacked in his favor through the Lakers’ marquee image and desirable location.

The business side of Lakers’ operation has long been careful with its spending, falling back on the realities that people do want to work for the Lakers because they’re the Lakers. Along the same lines, the Lakers will remain confident about attracting outstanding employees on the basketball side.

And while the finances help considerably, did the money train or the most super of superstar players matter more when the Lakers, Bulls, Celtics and Spurs won 24 of the past 32 NBA championships?

That’s the sort of question the Lakers will try to answer in the future, without a system that so helps build in Hollywood endings for them.

Buss has gotten to hold ‘em. He knows when it’s time to fold ‘em, too.

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